Quote

For novelists or musicians, if they really want to create something, they need to go downstairs and find a passage to get into the second basement. What I want to do is go down there, but still stay sane.

Haruki Murakami

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Haruki Murakami
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: January 12
Athletics Competitor
Essayist
Linguist
Novelist
Prosaist
Science Fiction Writer
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Kyōto
Murakami Haruki
Find
Musicians
Need
Novelists
Needs
Musician
Downstairs
Something
Second
Basement
Really
Stay
Basements
Create
Passage
Stills
Passages
Still
Sane

More quotes by Haruki Murakami

Image
I don’t know, I don’t feel right unless I’ve got the sea and mountains nearby. People are mostly a product of where they were born and raised. How you think and feel’s always linked to the lay of the land, the temperature. The prevailing winds, even.
Haruki Murakami
Image
It is the same with anything - you have to learn through your own experience, paying your own way. You can't learn it from a book.
Haruki Murakami
Image
Between the time the last train leaves and the first train arrives, the place changes: it's not the same as in daytime.
Haruki Murakami
Image
I lost some of my friends because I got so famous, people who just assumed that I would be different now. I felt like everyone hated me. That is the most unhappy time of my life.
Haruki Murakami
Image
Someone once said that nothing costs more and yields less benefit than revenge,” Aomame said. “Winston Churchill. As I recall it, though, he was making excuses for the British Empire’s budget deficits. It has no moral significance.
Haruki Murakami
Image
Sometimes, however, this sense of isolation, like acid spilling out of a bottle, can unconsciously eat away at a person’s heart and dissolve it.
Haruki Murakami
Image
Still, in the end, we all die just the same.
Haruki Murakami
Image
If I stayed here, something inside me would be lost forever—something I couldn't afford to lose. It was like a vague dream, a burning, unfulfilled desire. The kind of dream people have only when they're seventeen.
Haruki Murakami
Image
Whether in music or in fiction, the most basic thing is rhythm. Your style needs to have good, natural, steady rhythm, or people won't keep reading your work.
Haruki Murakami
Image
I have no models in Japanese literature. I created my own style, my own way.
Haruki Murakami
Image
I closed my eyes and listened carefully for the descendants of Sputnik, even now circling the earth, gravity their only tie to the planet. Lonely metal souls in the unimpeded darkness of space, they meet, pass each other, and part, never to meet again. No words passing between them. No promises to keep.
Haruki Murakami
Image
I could disappear from the face of the earth, and the world would go on moving without the slightest twinge. Things were tremendously complicated, to be sure, but one thing was clear: no one needed me.
Haruki Murakami
Image
I don't think of myself as an artist. I'm just a guy who can write.
Haruki Murakami
Image
But I found that the longer you teach, the more you feel like a total stranger to yourself
Haruki Murakami
Image
Pointless thinking is worse than no thinking at all.
Haruki Murakami
Image
Concentration is one of the happiest things in my life.
Haruki Murakami
Image
If you think God’s there, He is. If you don’t, He isn’t. And if that’s what God’s like, I wouldn’t worry about it.
Haruki Murakami
Image
I think people who share my dreams can enjoy reading my novels. And that's a wonderful thing. I said that myths are like a reservoir of stories, and if I can act as a similar kind of reservoir, albeit a modest one, that would make me very happy.
Haruki Murakami
Image
Either I'm funny or the world's funny. I don't know which. The bottle and lid don't fit. It could be the bottle's fault or the lid's fault. In either case, there's no denying that the fit is bad.
Haruki Murakami
Image
Overhead, the two moons worked together to bathe the world in a strange light.
Haruki Murakami